Windows Wordpad will open some MS Word documents.
I've also seen shareware and freeware viewers that will let you view an MS Word document (but not create or edit) as I needed to obtain one for somebody once.
I can't remember where I found them, but you might try the Garbo shareware library for a start. There's a ton of useful stuff there:
http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/garbo.html
